How can you effectively use influencer marketing in the hospitality industry?

1 Define your goals

Before you start looking for influencers, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your campaign. Do you want to increase bookings, generate leads, raise awareness, or drive traffic to your website? Depending on your goals, you will need to choose different types of influencers, platforms, content, and metrics to measure your results.

2 Find the right influencers

Not all influencers are created equal. You need to find the ones that match your brand values, target audience, and budget. You can use tools like BuzzSumo, Upfluence, or AspireIQ to search for influencers based on keywords, location, niche, and engagement. You can also look at your own social media followers, reviews, and referrals to identify potential influencers. Once you have a list of candidates, you need to vet them for authenticity, relevance, and credibility.

3 Build a relationship

Influencer marketing is not a one-off transaction. It is a long-term partnership that requires trust, communication, and mutual benefit. You need to build a relationship with your chosen influencers before, during, and after your campaign. You can do this by following them on social media, liking and commenting on their posts, sending them personalized messages, and offering them incentives and rewards. You also need to respect their creative freedom and let them tell your brand story in their own voice.

4 Create engaging content

The content that your influencers create and share is the core of your campaign. It needs to be engaging, relevant, and valuable for their audience and yours. You can collaborate with your influencers to come up with content ideas that showcase your hospitality products or services in an authentic and compelling way. You can also provide them with guidelines, resources, and examples to ensure consistency and quality. Some of the most popular content formats for influencer marketing are videos, stories, photos, blogs, and podcasts.

5 Track and optimize

The last step of your influencer marketing campaign is to track and optimize your performance. You need to monitor and measure the impact of your campaign on your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Some of the common KPIs for influencer marketing are reach, impressions, clicks, conversions, engagement, and sentiment. You can use tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, or Hootsuite to collect and analyze your data. You can also ask your influencers for feedback and reports. Based on your results, you can adjust your strategy, budget, content, and influencers to improve your outcomes.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?